A LOVE CALCULUS

Multiply the number of groups of people you hate by the number of individuals in those groups. The sum equals the number of reasons, causes, and triggers for you to experience the feeling of hatred in your heart; not only at those times of direct encounter with those persons, but also in each and every moment of your life. Every one of those moments is a fertile ground for you to think about, imagine, and contend with those persons. Your life is literally a minefield you walk, constantly stumbling over the mines of hatred you have chosen to plant. You even intentionally run to those mines and jump on them, so great is your determination to hate.

You can never escape triggering the sensation of hatred, which is not pleasurable but instead is a sour current of misery and suffering you channel through every particle, cell, vessel, and organ of who you are. You have chosen to inundate yourself with hatred, a monsoon flood of never-ending ailment, all because you have decided that you have good reason to hate this group or that group. Your true joy has become a limp, lifeless carcass, drowned in the flood of your reasons to hate.

Some of us are passionate explorers of that barren terrain yielding reasons to hate. We expunge all awareness and memories of any possible goodness in a people, any hint or potential of worth or value, just so we can hunt freely for hate-reasons. We want the open-season without catch or kill limits. Whenever we come upon a flare-up of humanness, dimension, or texture in our idea of a people, fear and discomfort strike us as though we have encountered the beginnings of a forest fire. In the flush of this unsettling contradiction to what we seek-hatred-worthy characteristics in others-we reach for our water pail of mental erasing and douse the flame. We are here in this land, this place of strategic reasoning, to discover artifacts qualified for hating. We are not here to see beauty or worth. And so we kill with volatility whatever gets in the way of our expedition.

In the end, when you have multiplied the reasons for your hatred by the population size of your hated groups, you have unwittingly painted yourself into a corner in which you cannot step, look, reach, breathe, think, or even feel without stumbling over a self-chosen reason for hatred. You have harvested hatred and because your mind is magnificent in its power, you have accumulated a vast and burdensome harvest.

Now imagine a different harvest. Summon the Love you have for someone you hold dear. Experience that feeling of warmth and bliss cascade through your being. You have now blessed and baptized yourself in the endless reservoir of Love that you have in you, all because you have decided you have good reason to Love this particular person. Now you are drowning in Love, your joy a vibrant light illuminating this flood.

Ask yourself: Which feels better to my heart and soul? To hate or to Love? If Love is your answer, you are fortunate, for you have the means to fill your life and vessel with that which feels good to your heart, mind, and soul. All you have to do now is make another decision: Choose to expand your Love. That which you feel for that special person, people, or group, simply break down your stingy walls of exclusion and extend your Love! By nature, Love will flow anywhere you allow it. Like water, it will fill, soak into, and become the essence of all that you let it touch. It is the Bright Monsoon. All you need do is choose to Love.

Decide you have good reason to Love that group, and that group, and that one. Go crazy admitting more and more groups into your house of Love, regardless of their imperfections or the way they discomfort or challenge you. Become a stubborn Lover even in the face of those who scorn you. Become a seer of your Love’s roots in others. Become a graffiti artist with Love as your paint. Spray it over even the most desolate human souls. Beautify and resurrect them. Bring them to life. Your life of Love.

Eventually you will be able to calculate an incredible mathematics. You will be able to multiply the number of groups you have chose to Love by the number of individuals in those groups. If you decide to decimate all your walls and come up with reasons to let the whole world in, you will have blessed and baptized your entire life and every moment of your life. You will have blessed yourself with causes, reasons, and triggers for your heart, mind, and soul to be flooded with and experience the blissful sensation of Love. Not because the world came begging for your charity, its carts loaded with reasons for your Love, but because you chose to come up with your own reasons. Because you wanted to have endless triggers for your stream of moments in which you could not help but constantly, in your movement, thoughts, and imagination run into human reasons to let loose your Love. Make this choice and you will have solved the greatest calculus of them all.

This essay is part of the Soul Water Rising essay series. All essays in this series are archived and available at jaiyajohn.com. New essays are announced through our journal, Soul Blossom. Dissemination and reposting for educational and inspirational use only is encouraged.